Critical Essay by Christopher Herbert

In the following essay, Herbert offers a religious interpretation of Dracula.

Here chiefly, Lord, we feed on Thee, And drink Thy precious Blood.

—Charles Wesley1

Religion/superstition

Once consigned to the limbo of the subliterary, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) has attained canonical status by gaining recognition as a pioneering exploration of forbidden zones of sex.2 The strong religious thrust of this novel has correspondingly been ignored, not to say suppressed, in recent criticism: acknowledging the primacy of a broad vein of late-Victorian religious sentiment in Stoker's sensationalistic Gothic tale has evidently seemed to its interpreters hard to square with claiming it as a significant literary object—or even, indeed, as “the first great modern novel in British literature.”3 Restoring its religious motivation to...